Tribler: Video On Demand

ITT, has finally come back from it's long break and will be providing new content immediately (serious, read below). We will also be finishing the promised WebHosting Article as promised.

The latest version of the “social” BitTorrent client Tribler integrates BitTorrent with YouTube while offering the best of both worlds: ease of use, browsing with thumbnails, HDTV quality, and Video on Demand support. The client uses an Amazon.com-like recommendation system to suggest what you might enjoy.

After you’ve downloaded a few files the application should know if you are the Madonna type or more a Britney person. Moreover, it is the first P2P system which has merged online friends and a sense of community without using any central server. Tribler also runs on a Linux set-top box and is expected to hit the shops before the end of this year.

After a long weekend of testing we gave a thumbs-up and wish the development team many more releases. Not all BitTorrent users see the need for all these extra functionalities (I still prefer uTorrent), but those who do should definitely try Tribler.

Some of the features of Tribler which set it apart from other BitTorrent clients are:

Easy downloading: Moves P2P beyond keyword search, YouTube grid of thumbnails

Recommendation and Friends: See what other people like, related files, find person with the same taste

Video on Demand: When the download is on its way, you can use the integrated video player to start watching ASAP

Wealth of content: Search both BitTorrent, Youtube, and Liveleak for content

Yes, we are probably a little biased! This is made-in-Holland, which means a part of the tax money I paid went to Tribler because the project is state funded.

Here is a screenshot of the file view with Youtube-like thumbnail grid. You can download download Tribler V4.0 here.

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ITT's personal opinion: Tribler is like the Americanised version of PPLive. In otherwords this is nothing new. The Chinese and Brazilian have been using this technology for a couple of years now. Successfully as well.

Although it may seem that the benefits of this program, is this really something new or just another reiteration of another bittorrent program?

For example, µTorrent really is a beautiful piece of Windows software. Free, small footprint, low memory requirements, self-contained; no installation just run the .exe as-is. It's not intrusive. It doesn't gunk up your machine with stray DLLs, registry garbage, or anything like that. And for all of that, it's a really excellent, configurable, useable, non-constricting. Written in C++, no MFC.

I don't even need to try it to tell you that this Tribler thing is garbage by comparison. No matter how many bells and whistles it has.

Besides all of this, at the end of the day, it's still a "State-Funded" Project. (Although some may argue that it might not be the same in your country, but the Netherlands is a really free country. Just because it's state funded doesn't mean that they have much influence on the project. Also, did you know that a lot of the p2p research has been done by universities? For example, the Kademlia network (also known as DHT) was created by a university.)

Some issues found so far include that half the videos were choppy or didn't play at all, and bittorrent took 10 minutes to connect, whereas utorrent connected in 30 seconds for the same torrent. There is also a lack of videos and download is a problem.

In the end, I'm sticking with uTorrent